ENGL 396

Spring 2018 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 16-May 2

Honors Seminar I

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Themes, movements, and forms in British, American, and Anglophone literature.

May be repeated. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade-point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to English and Rhetoric majors.

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ENGL 396 class schedule data for spring 2018
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32114	Lecture-Discussion	C	10:00AM -11:15AM	MW	English Building	Loughran, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/18-05/02/18 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Adventures in Posthumanism Section Info: TOPIC: Adventures in Posthumanism: (How It Feels To Be a) Human, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Machine How does a hawk (or a dog, or a tree) think? Can a person fall in love with her computer’s operating system? What would it be like to be born a rock, or an eggplant? These are the kinds of questions we’ll think about in this course, as we watch films, read novels, play games, and read scholarship together. The humanities have in recent years taken a counterintuitive turn into what is now sometimes called the “post-human” or the “non-human.” This means we find ourselves increasingly interested in trying to think in ways that put human life less at the center of the universe (or at the top of the planetary feeding chain). In the place of the vertical feeding chain, more horizontal relations are imagined among people, animals, extraterrestrial "aliens," the environment, and artificial intelligences (like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana). The reading list for Spring 2018 is still under construction but primary texts we might consider include: fiction by Mary Shelley, Jeff VanderMeer, T.H. White, and H.P Lovecraft; memoirs by Temple Grandin and Helen McDonald; films like Her, The Beasts of the Southern Wild, Under the Skin, and Francois Truffaut’s Wild Child; and videogames like BioShock, Bloodborne, Soma, or Prey (no gaming experience is necessary). Secondary reading is likely to include a range of "nonhumanist" scholars, with a strong emphasis on feminist and queer perspectives, and is likely to include work from Jacques Derrida, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Ian Bogost, Alexander Galloway, Gayatri Spivak, Jane Bennett, Mel Chen, and others.
	62424	Lecture-Discussion	F	2:00PM -3:50PM	W	English Building	Mahaffey, V	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/18-05/02/18 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Joyce and Textual Excess Section Info: Joyce has the reputation of being difficult to read. In this course, we will explore the possibility that the problem may lie not in the difficulty of the text, but in the assumptions about reading that readers bring to the activity. What if Joyce’s project is one of textual excess? What if in Ulysses, the movement of the text is centrifugal, its apparent focus on the here (Dublin) and now (June 16, 1904) pointing out towards the complexity of an international and richly historical context for human life? Instead of trying o shape or contain experience, could Joyce be attempting to access its wayward energies, both conscious and unconscious? Many critics would agree that popular culture offers a window through which readers are invited to observe the lives of other people. Literature differs in that the window has been backed with silver, making it a mirror in which readers can see themselves. Wilde played with this notion, as did Woolf, What role might be played by textual excess in thickening the medium, so that the reader can gain insight into him or herself while seeming to enjoy the voyeuristic pleasures of watching others unobserved? We will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Odyssey, Hamlet, Ulysses, and an episode from Finnegans Wake. Requirements include quizzes on the reading, one one-page oral report to be written, distributed, and read aloud, regular attendance and participation, and two essays and/or podcasts or “media” essays.